The Other Side of Selma

Posted on June 14, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Other Side of Selma
© 2001 R.B. “Dickie” Williams
103 pages

Years ago while roaming aimlessly in my home library, I spotted a little collection of stories about Selma during the fifties and sixties. I read and enjoyed it, as the book added depth to the downtown area for me. Selma was almost a different town in those days, the economy primarily main-street: now the town’s old commerical thoroughfare consists of abandoned buildings with boarded up windows, shopping being down on a depressing stretch of highway flanked by fields of concrete and boxes with bright neon signs. Part of the decay is simply the passage of time, but the closing of Selma’s air force base dealt it a serious blow. This summer I’ve been walking the streets of downtown, pondering each building in turn, thinking about the human stories that have played out through the years. I realized recently that revisiting The Other Side of Selma — an “old fogey’s” recollections of the Selma-that-was would be appropriate for this summer tour.

Williams’ style is simple: he shares funny, mysterious, touching, romantic, and outlandish stories to the reader about the people who lived in Selma during those days. No reference is given to the town’s turmoil during the Civil Rights movement: this portrays Selma’s Andy Griffith existence. Selma had a blind bookseller who could feel dollar bills and tell you their denomination, a barber who claimed to speak Russian fluently until he was embarrased by a visiting Russian-language professor, and a man who was known for his barbequed chicken because he did clean-up at the local underground cockfighting club. There are many little stories in here that will give me a slight smile whenever I drive through town and see various settings for these stories: for instance, when I return to Mabry Street to finish taking pictures of historic architecture there, I will know under one particular house there once were a barreful of ruined and water-swollen peas, dumped there by a newlywed woman who wanted to hide her first botched attempt at cooking black-eyed peas from her husband, so she and her friend threw them in an unoccupied house’s basement.

Like Memories of Old Cahaba, this has somewhat limited appeal — although Williams’ stories are entertaining enough by themselves even outside the context of Selma that casual readers looking for a few nostalgic chuckles will enjoy this, particulartly if they hail from this time period or the mid-century South.

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The Roving Mind

Posted on June 12, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Roving Mind
© Isaac Asimov 1983
350 pages

In the first place, I type quickly — 90 words a minute, when I am happy, carefree, and in a good mood. And that’s my typing rate when I am composing, too, because I don’t believe in fancy stuff. In my writing, there is no poetry, no complexity, no literary frills. Therefore, I need only barrel along, saying whatever comes to mind, and waving cheerfully at people who happen to pass my typewriter.” (337)

The Roving Mind collects sixty-two essays by Isaac Asimov, the majority scientifically-themed, along with several tributes to the late Asimov by friends and comrades who knew him well. The essays by men like Paul Kurtz and Carl Sagan update a volume originally printed in the early eighties, and the essays reflect the preceding period, particularly the seventies.  Asimov’s thoughts on the future are particularly interesting, as he seems to predict consumer-specific advertising and entertainment (as in TiVo and Google) and a computer-oriented marketplace that allows customers to buy goods and reserve hotel rooms through their private consoles. Other essays take on religious dogma and political  matters of interest (censorship), warn of the dangers of increasing population,  reflect on the human condition, and share Asimov’s thoughts on the increasing role of technology in everyday lives, particularly in his own: he devotes three essays to his new-fangled Word Processor. Interesting topics abound, as is par for the course given Asimov’s many varied interests, and his explanations are both lucid and witty with plenty of eccentric charm. Especially notable for me:

  • “The Reagan Doctrine”, a satirical essay tackling the idea that believing in God is necessary for morality. “In every country, you’ll find large numbers who claim that the United States fought a cruel and unjust war in Vietnam and that it is the most violent and crime-ridden nation in the world. They don’t seem to be impressed by the fact that we’re God-fearing. Next they’ll be saving that Ronald Reagan (our very own president) doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
  • “Technophobia”, in which Asimov addresses the various reasons people fear society’s increasing dependency upon technology, although most of the essay is given over to overcoming people’s dislike of having to learn new things. He recounts his experiences with the word-processor, how it was foisted upon him and how he studiously avoided so much as even looking at it.
  • “Pure and Impure” takes on the prejudice intellectuals, particularly theorists and liberal-arts snobs like myself, may have  against applied or “dirty” knowledge. 
  • “Art and Science” sees Asimov write on one of my favorite subjects,  the connections between every field of human knowledge. “If you look at an electron micrograph of a sponge spicule or of a diatom (you can find both in the 1977 Yearbook), you don’t know whether to admire them as products of science or as works of artistic beauty — And it doesn’t matter; the two are the same.”
  • “The Sky of the Satellites” is a favorite: Asimov imagines what the skies of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons look like
  • “The Surprises of Pluto”, in which Asimov states: “Pluto is scarcely a respectable planet; it is more like a large asteroid.”
  • “The Ultimate in Communication”, which Asimov sees as YouTube with VHS cassettes. 
  • “Touring the Moon” is a faux-news essay detailing what visitors to Earth’s colony on the moon may expect from their trip. “Nothing, apparently, can prevent [the Moon’s gravity] from being a surprise to first-timers. After the initial shock, the reaction is inevitable amusement, and a tendency to try walking, hopping, or jumping, despite the large signs that ring every possible change on the message, “Please do not run or jump, but wait quietly for processing.”
  • “The Word-Processor and I” is the first of Asimov’s essays detailing his partial conversion from typewriters to word processor. “With the help of my dear wife, Janet, [the Radio Shack guide] set up a ‘computer corner’ in our living room. Within it, the word-processor was unboxed, hooked together, and plugged in. I did my bit, to be sure. I kept saying, ‘I don’t think we have any space for a word-processor anywhere,’ but no one listened to me.”
This is a fun collection particularly of interest to skeptics and humanists, but enjoyable to all who delight in reading Asimov in general.
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Memories of Old Cahaba

Posted on June 12, 2010 by smellincoffee
Memories of Old Cahaba
© 1905 Anna M. Gayle Fry
122 pages
I live perhaps fifteen miles from the conjunction of the Alabama and Cahaba Rivers, where once sat a booming and stately city — home to the Alabama legislature and the county courthouse, and a center of commerce. That city is gone. If you visit it today, you will find a stray chimney, some columns amidst overgrown wilderness near the Cahaba river, and crumbling slave quarters. Dirt lanes pass through fields of green, dotted by the occasional signpost to tell visitors of the town that was — for Cahaba is long-dead, a ghost town.
My childhood memories of visiting the place are compelling: I recall a landscape dotted by decaying ruins, streets flanked by leafy trees, the limbs of which hung low from the Spanish moss and moved gently in the breeze. The place seemed eerie, as if ghosts walked it during the middle of the day. I decided to visit the place once more last weekend. It seemed more like a large park than a ghost town: the old allure absent. I decided to visit it again, this time with my father — who could tell stories of it — and this time armed with the memoirs of someone who once lived there and which could make mansions rise from empty green spaces. As it happens, Anna Gayle Fry’s Memories of Old Cahaba  is exceptional for that purpose: the author literally moves street by street telling the reader of what used to be on “the west side of Vine Street”, or “at the corner of Union and First North” streets. I can and will take this book to Cahaba and make it serve as a tour guide of sorts. Fry combine her own experiences living in the town with historical research to give the reader a larger perspective.
Stories about the town’s occupants drift in and out of the guide to the town, and descriptions of the town itself are heavily romanticized. This book reads like Gone with the Wind in its nostalgia for the days gone by. According to the author’s depiction, Cahaba was a place filled with stately homes and bustling businesses, where men with dapper mustaches waited for the steamboat to come by, while doffing their hats to delicately-dressed ladies, all served by a host of happy slaves. The book’s banal treatment of slavery was particularly bothersome. Southern feudalism is mourned for, not condemned, in this book: the few freedmen are beggars, and those who dare strike against their masters are regarded as ‘ignorant creatures’. The book ends with a long poem that partially laments slave uprisings and emancipation.
“For the third time within the memory of man, the town became a deserted village.The scenes of 1826 were repeated. The doors of the business houses were all closed and locked, the stately homes were abandoned and deserted. Flowers again bloomed untended in the lovely yards and grass covered the principal streets. An air of loneliness and desolation impossible to describe encompassed the place. Where wealth and fashion a few short years before held unlimited sway, ruin and desolation now danced in high carnival, and one could be exclaim: “Time! Time! How inscrutable are thy changes!”
The book has limited appeal: in its day, it ignited popular interest in the site among Alabamians, sowing the seeds for some historical preservation. The street-by-street recollection works for me given that I live so close to the site that I can immediately apply the information: I can readily relate to the description of the Crocheron mansion beside the two rivers, for instance, because I’ve been there: I’ve wandered through the woods being chased by a wasp to emerge in a clearing where three columns stand, bearing witness that once something great sat there. I suspect others will find the detailed descriptions a trifle dull. When I visit Cahaba again tomorrow, I shall find the book of value: in fact, I’ve integrated Fry’s descriptions and parts of the poem that give the town’s history into my photo-tour of the place on Facebook.
If you plan to visit Old Cahaba, then by all means stop by the Selma library and give this book a look-see: I doubt you’ll find it elsewhere, unless you buy a used copy off of Amazon.
Pictures are cropped from larger images taken during my trip last week: I’m going again tomorrow, or by this point “later today”.
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Bibliomeming

Posted on June 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

I don’t do memes very often here, mostly because if I started I wouldn’t know where to stop. If I tried to follow every meme from ShouldBeReading, for instance, I’d be so busy typing I wouldn’t have time to read. (As it is, I only do the one, and that’s mostly because I like quotations.)

I got this, though, from Seeking a Little Truth.
————————————————————————————



Do you snack while reading? 
– I read on-and-off throughout the day, and sometimes during meals, so it’s inevitable that I snack sometimes while reading.  I tend to want to snack while I’m reading, but given how often I read that would be an unhealthy habit. That association goes the other way around, too: if I’m about to eat or drink, I reach for something to read. If there’s no book nearby, I’ll go to TvTropes or go through the archives of Unshelved or Questionable Content.  Food intake = word intake for me.
What is your favourite drink while reading? 
–  I always have something to drink when I’m reading, usually just water.  I drink coffee in the morning and tea at meal times. Water is my main  “I want to be sipping something…” source.
Do you tend to mark your books while you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you? 
– I once tried writing in a book, and my hand autonomously slapped me.  Instead, I copy passages on the opposite (unused) sides of my bound journal and comment on them there. 
How do you keep your place? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book open flat? 
– I memorize page numbers or  take note of an endpoint — a line of dialogue, that sort of thing. When I use bookmarks, I use anything — napkins, actual bookmarks, pens, leaves, paperclips….
(Yeah. Leaves. I read under a tree sometimes.)
Fiction, non-fiction or both? 
– Both. Ever since 2006, when I decided I wanted to maintain a broad general knowledge, nonfiction became the major part of my reading diet. I started working in more fiction to balance things out — I love a good story — and I suppose by now they’re even-ish.
Do you tend to read to the end of a chapter or can you stop anywhere?
– Since I read on and off throughout the day, I usually stop at the end of a sentence. I can leave off in mid-sentence, but I probably wouldn’t.  
“Run for your life, there’s an axe murderer coming!”
“Just onnnnne minute.”
Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you? 
– No: I can’t even bring myself to throw away or damage useless books from my fundamentalist Pentecostal days. I’ll give the book a savage look and stop reading it if it’s bad enough, but I’m a sissy when it comes to hurting them.
What are you currently reading? 
– I am working through a collection of essays by Isaac Asimov called The Roving Mind and am zipping through a short collection of local stories called The Other Side of Selma.
What is the last book you bought? 
– In a brick-and-mortar store, “Elizabeth the Queen” by Alison Weir, which is a biography of Elizabeth I beginning with her coronation. Online, I bought…Asimov’s Chronology of Science and Discovery last weekish. 
Do you have a favourite time/place to read? 
– I’m a chronic reader: I read on and off throughout the day.  When school is in session, for instance, I read before class and sometimes during the lecture if I’m already familiar with the source and am only in class for the teacher’s jokes. I also read at work as I can. I’m never far from a book, typically bringing a pocket-sized paperback with me on walks and keeping books in my car in case I get stopped by a train or stuck in traffic.   At home, I usuaully read devotedly for an hour or two a day ASIDE from the off-and-on stuff. 

All that said, I guess I like my Sunday mornings — at school, I’d sit under this tree with a bottle of water all morning, just reading and listening to the birds and wind. When school’s not in session, I open the curtains of my living room and sit on the couch, listening to soft music and reading until noon.
Do you prefer series books or stand-alones? 
– No real preference. I like being involved with book series, but most of my reading consists of stand-alone works, both fiction and non.
Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over? 
– Not especially: I can gush forever about Isaac Asimov, and I’ll easily recommend certain authors for certain subjects,  but I don’t think there’s one particular book that holds sway. 
If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away? 
– I play with it first. Etymology’s one of my many interests, so I can usually take a word apart and derive some sort of meaning. I’ll google it if I can’t understand the passage without knowing the word. I write down unknown words in my journal, and then look up the definitions and derivations for them later. Also, if I suddenly want to know the origin of a turn of phrase (“Scot-free”, for instance, or “I’ll catch you on the flip side”, I’ll write that down and look it up later. )
How do you organize your books (by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)? 
– I don’t have one specific organizational pattern at present:  in general, the closer to my bed a book is, the more I like it. If they’re not in shelves, they’re inside the ottoman or in a trunk at the foot of my bed. I group series together, and I stick large unwieldy books together, but that’s about it as far as organization goes — for now. 


See anything you recognize? (Click for larger image.) This is my bed’s bookcase, which holds most of my favorites and a few odds-and-ends. There’s a couple of books on German grammar in there, for instance.

Background noise or silence? 
– I can work with either, though I prefer some music — usually soft classical music or instrumentals with an ‘Eastern’ feel. 

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This Week at the Library (9/6)

Posted on June 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

This week…

I started off with Michael Jan Friedman’s Death in Winter, the origin of The Next Generation‘s “relaunch” in novelizations. With the Enterprise still being repaired following Nemesis, Picard is tasked with carrying out a secret mission in Romulan space that his dear — and beloved — friend Dr. Crusher was captured in attempting to  accomplish. The novel pushes Picard and Crusher closer together while giving the reader a healthy dose of adventure and Romulan politics. Enjoyable, as I would expect from Friedman.

Next up, Around the World in 80 Days, a classic tale of Gilded Age adventure. Following a bet with his friends that he could — in 1872 — circumnavigate the globe in less than three months. Mr. Phineas Fogg sets off to travel the world by sea, by train — and by elephant, if necessary. He does this while being chased by a detective who’s pinned him for a bank robbery, and must face the perils of nature and angry Indians. It’s a delightful little read that’s brimming with 19th century optimism in technology and the future.

I also read Dinosaur Lives, a memoir of sorts by Dr. John Horner that recounts his experiences in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which he began pushing the conception of dinosaurs beyond cold-blooded “big lizards” and placed them more accurately within their evolutionary context. The book also gives readers an idea as to how paleontologists do their craft.

My last read for this week — finishing up after three weeks — was Charles Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities, a story of revolution and redemption. Thick with language at times, but worth wading through given my interest in the French revolution and my shared horror with Dickens at the inhumanity of it.

Pick of the Week: Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.

Upcoming Reads:

  • The Other Side of Selma, R.B. “Dickie” Williams. This is a short little collection of real-life stories about my hometown of Selma in its “glory days”. I read it once years ago and am rereading it in conjunction with my summer project — exploring downtown Selma on foot and taking pictures of its more interesting sights. 
  • The Roving Mind, Isaac Asimov. A collection of essays on diverse subjects.
  • Tales of the Dominion War, a multiple-author short-story collection set in Deep Space Nine‘s epic war. The book is written to show the war from the perspective of various ships and people throughout the Alpha Quadrant, which should be fun. 
  • Memories of Old Cahaba, Anna M. Gaylor. “Old Cahaba” is a nearby ghost town, once a booming river city and the capital of my home state of Alabama. I visited recently, and wanted to read this memoir to shed some light. 
  • Hornblower and the Hotspur, C.S. Forester
  • The Magicians, Lev Grossman. Spotted this in reader Joy’s “Tuesday Teaser” and thought it interesting.

This weekend should be fun– I’ve many choices.

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A Tale of Two Cities

Posted on June 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

A Tale of Two Cities
© 1859 Charles Dickens
353 pages

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree only. 

I’ve wanted to read A Tale of Two Cities for a long time, not for its reputation as a classic so much as its setting: the French revolution fascinates me, and as this is “the” novel of the French Revolution, it surely merits my attention. According to the introduction of my copy, Dickens regarded this as his best and favorite work, and he wrote it in a hurry — dispensing with his usual wordiness.  I can’t speak for that, as A Tale of Two Cities is as florid as any work of the Victorian period I’ve yet read. Although I approached the novel thinking it to be chiefly about the French Revolution,  Dickens keeps his focus on a few varied characters living in England for most of the book: Charles Darnay, a French nobleman who renounced his title to support himself in England;  Dr. Alexander Manette, a physician long imprisoned whose release at the outset of the book starts the plot; Sidney Carton, an alcoholic lawyer’s associate in England who believes he will never amount to anything;  Lucie Manette, the doctor’s daughter who has been raised in England during her father’s captivity; and Jarvis Lorry, a kindly old banker.

The story is told in three parts, the first being set nearly a decade before the revolution begins. After introducing the primary characters, Dickens slowly works toward the uprising that began the French revolution, ultimately having them ensnared by it through no fault of his own. He plainly expects his audience to know what the French revolution was and why it occurred: modern audiences who are more distant from its context would do well to peruse information on the subject before diving in. While Dickens writes the book to comment on the horrors of violent revolutions — specifically, the inhumanity they unleash —  his main characters also give the reader a story of love and redemption.  The book was not as I expected in being wholly about the revolution, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I particularly enjoyed Dickens’ use of foreshadowing at the outset of the book, when a comic writes the word “BLOOD” on the walls of a local shop using spilled red wine: Dickens comments that the day would soon come that ‘that’ wine, too, would soon spill and stain the streets.

  Being such a classic, it’s almost pointless for me to “recommend” this: I’m certain most readers are familiar with its reputation. I considered it worth my while.

An illustration from my edition.(© 1942 Halbot K. Browne)
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Dinosaur Lives

Posted on June 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

Dinosaur Lives: Unearthing an Evolutionary Saga
© 1998 John Horner
256 pages


   I picked up John Horner’s Dinosaur Lives  out of idle curiosity, not having read anything about dinosaurs since childhood. They remain of interest, of course, but it’s not an interest I’ve particularly pursued. Horner’s approach is that of a detailed log of his teams’ excavations in the late 1980s and early 1990s that he uses to communicate to the reader how archaeologists work  in piecing together not only skeletons, but theories of understanding based on limited information.  Horner places stronger emphasis on dinosaurs as being apart from reptiles, giving particular consideration to their unique behaviors that carry on today in the form of birds — the tendency of some species to gather in large colonies during the egg-laying season, and the possibility that some dinosaurs tended to their young just as birds to, instead of abandoning them to instincts alone.

        Fascinating in parts and slightly tedious in others, I enjoyed the book overall and found the update on current trends in paleontology useful. 
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Teaser Mardi 8-7

Posted on June 8, 2010 by smellincoffee

To arms, citizens! The time has come! — for….Teaser Tuesday!

“Come then!” cried DeFarge, in a resounding voice. “Patriots and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!”

– 245, A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens.

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Around the World in 80 Days

Posted on June 6, 2010 by smellincoffee

Around the World in 80 Days
© 1872 Jules Verne
160 pages

Like most highly-praised  western literature, I first read Around the World in 80 Days through the Great Illustrated Classics series, along with other Verne works. I’ve never read Verne as an adult, and decided to remedy that this week. Around the World seemed best,  as I was in the mood for a world-traveling adventure.

In the year 1872, Phineas Fogg made a bet with his friends at the local gentleman’s club, staking half his fortune — £20000 — that he could leave the club, take a train to the shore, board a ship, and travel completely around the world in less than three months — in eighty days, in fact. His friends think they are taking their dinner companion for a sucker — travel the world in eighty days? Even with steamships and rail-lines spanning continents, it’s simply not possible! There are too many variables to ensure success — ill weather, for instance, or mechanical failure. Fogg coldly defends his premise and sets out along with his freshly-hired manservant, Passepartout.

Starting from England, Fogg sails through the Suez Canal, intending to travel across India by train and then take connecting steamers from China to Japan and there to the United States; a train across the continent, and a final steamer back to Liverpool. Fogg doesn’t think the odds are against him, although all the world does — and so he dares the universe to do its worst. Even if storms, the Indian jungle, and Sioux raiding parties were not enough to derail Fogg’s timetable, he departs England with a detective on his heels:  a policeman named Mr. Fix has decided that the eccentric Mr. Fog, a man of substantial means but no visible way of acquiring them, recently robbed a bank for £12,000 pounds and has set out on this bet to throw the law off his trail.

      I didn’t expect a book from the 19th century to be such a breezy, fun read: I look forward to visiting Verne more. Verne is obviously writing for 1872’s readers, who live in a world where a continent may be spanned in a week, where all the world is open to them provided their country has access to sufficient coaling stations: the narrator serves as a tour guide, excitedly lecturing on the geography and history of our characters’  waystations while Fogg stares resolutely toward the future (or to his schedule) and Passepartout stares at the surroundings in confusion and awe. All the varied landscapes of the world carry with them their hazards: some natural, and some fabricated. Passepartout learns that the hard way when he accidentally violates Hindu customs and barely escapes with his life.

   A trip around the world in eighty days may seem unremarkable to 21st century personalities accustomed to jet planes, but if readers can settle down into the age in which technological progress was first taken for granted, into a world being radically altered by steam power and nation-states with focused economies, they may stand breathlessly on the deck of a steamship beside Passepourtout and wonder at what is possible. Around the World is definitely one to recommend.

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Death in Winter

Posted on June 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

Death in Winter
© 2007 Michael Jan Friedman
368 pages

I’ve been meaning to dive back into contemporary Trek lit for some time now, but have been somewhat daunted by a shift in the literature: instead of new releases being published as self-contained novels, Star Trek books today tend to fit into a newly-created extended universe canon that roared into existence following the end of Deep Space Nine and the rise of the “Deep Space Nine Relaunch”,  a collection of individual books and series set in the post-“What You Leave Behind” era and which gave the show an eighth season in book form.  The Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise soon experienced their own “relaunches”, all of these relaunches tied to one another creating the type of expanded universe that Star Wars readers have so long enjoyed. The downside of this is that it increases the amount of background needed to be absorbed to enjoy a given book fully dramatically. I thus posted on TrekBBS and asked for a map of sorts to prepare me to read the newly released Star Trek: Destiny series, and the information I compiled suggested that Michael Jan Friedman’s Death in Winter was the place to start.

I could think of no matter, for Friedman is my favorite Trek author: I enjoyed his Stargazer series depicting Captain Picard’s first command immensely, falling in love with the characters and eagerly waiting more. Now Friedman tackles Picard in the days following Nemesis: the Romulan empire is in turmoil after the assassination of most of its senate, and most of Picard’s command crew has left him. Riker is now the captain of the USS Titan (and has his own book series, along with Troi):  Data is dead, and Dr. Crusher has decided to become the head of Starfleet medical once more, leaving Picard with only LaForge and Worf to help him oversee the Enterprise’s extensive repair and retrofitting following its fight in Nemesis.

Of those lost crewmembers, Picard misses Crusher the most:  one of the first season’s opening episodes established romantic tension between the two, and they enjoyed a special relationship throughout the series.  Recent events have made their mutual love for each other more acute, making Crusher’s departure hard to bear.  While Picard sees to his ship, Crusher is sent on a secret mission to the outskirts of Romulan territory to prepare a vaccine on a plague planet.  Her mission goes awry when the half-human, half-Romulan Commander Sela learns of a Federation officer’s presence on her planet, and Picard is tasked with escorting another doctor to the planet and — if he can — finding the newly-imprisoned and possibly dead Dr. Crusher. Picard, along with old comrades from the Stargazer, steal into Romulan territory and try to find allies while a political battle for control of Romulus wages. If Picard is not careful — and if he cannot keep his emotions concerning the doctor from interfering with the mission — he, Crusher, and their comrades may be used as political pawns by the various senators and admirals who want their voice to guide the battered Star Empire.

Friedman lives up to expectations, doing justice to the TNG crew and handling Romulan politics well enough that I did not tire of it.  I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of Stargazer officers given my fondness for that series. The four threads of the book — Picard’s efforts to find Crusher, political espionage and maneuverering between Romulan factions, Beverly’s role in those maneuverers, and Worf and Geordi’s struggle to do  their duty — mesh neatly together to make for a compelling read.

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