Book Log

Lee Child’s Night School (Delacorte Press, 2016) is the 21^st book in his Jack Reacher series.  This one has Reacher still in the army, assigned to a group of intelligence officers who are tracking the activities of a terrorist group in Germany in 1996.  Reacher is the analytical one in his “night school,” as well as the best street fighter “because he enjoys it.”  The only other member of the group who comes alive as a character at all is Dr. Marian Sinclair, perceived by Reacher as “all toned arms and dark nylons and good shoes” and with whom he has an affair.  The plot is more complex than usual, with a number of groups chasing what the terrorists are trying to buy, though Reacher and his group is not sure what that is.  Each Reacher novel takes place in a different location and here it is Germany, with extensive and sometimes confusing overlapping of authority, and Reacher’s usual ability to cut through the complexities of details to the essentials.

Michael Connelly’s The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Little Brown, 2016) is the 24^th in his Harry Bosch series.  In this excellent procedural Bosch is both a cop, working unpaid for the San Fernando police department, and a private detective, choosy about what cases he takes.  Connolly, like Raymond Chandler, has a strong feeling for the details of life in Los Angeles and how all those details connect via freeways and streets.  Harry has strong memories of his time in Vietnam, memories that have an important role in the private case he handles in The Wrong Side of Goodbye.  He also has a knowledge of the diverse population of Los Angeles, an intense love for his daughter, and an appreciation of Vic Scully, the Los Angeles Dodgers announcer.  Bosch knows how to use all the resources of the police department and how to make intelligent guesses based on his years of experience.

Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper Collins, 2016), by J.D. Vance, a hillbilly who went to Yale Law School, is interesting in itself but also in the context of the recent election: “Whenever people ask me what I would most like to change about the white working class I say ‘the feeling that our choices don’t matter.’”  Many hillbillies were lured to the Midwest for jobs after WWII and left their support system of family and church behind.  When the jobs started to disappear those who made the trip were cast adrift and divorce, abuse and drug use became common. Vance was fortunate that he had a grandmother who looked out for him and held him to the high standards that she knew he was capable of.  But what about those not so fortunate?  Vance is as unclear as most of us what those without luck and a supportive relative can do, though extensive job training, better schools and free college tuition could certainly help.

A Thousand Cuts:  The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies (The University Press of Mississippi,2016) by Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph.  Things have changed since that day in the 70’s when I went to see a secret screening of Vertigo, the Hitchcock film that was out of distribution and could not legally be shown.  Somehow Hitchcock’s lawyers heard about the showing and showed up to stop it.   Now one can see Vertigo (voted in a Sight and Sound poll as the greatest film ever) on DVD anytime one chooses to do so!  A Thousand Cuts interviews the people who saved films which were often unavailable otherwise.  When I was writing an article about Billy Wilder’s remake of The Front Page (1974) the original film version, made by Lewis Milestone in 1931, was completely unavailable.  But collector and film scholar William K. Everson had a print of the Milestone version and was kind enough to show it to me in his apartment.   One can only hope that the movies that survive on film can still be saved, with the help of companies such as Turner Classic Movies and individuals such as Martin Scorcese.